At 01:34 12/12/02, you wrote:
John, Now add in your time at $80 per hour to get your "normal people" cost
impact. That's the part that hurts. Especially if the kid doing the work is
getting minimum wage. /jim
Jim,
Didn't want to make fun of Brian's predicament. I was actually smiling at
the thought of carrying out the first steps in a major system upgrade this
weekend. The very best laid plans are only good until the first shot is
fired. All the planning does in reality is assemble the necessary
resources. It never proceeds as originally planned and a there's always a
few surprises. I'm trying **not** to think about the market value of my
time in doing this. It's sweat equity; at least that's what I keep
repeating to myself. Someday I might actully believe it. In the end
though I know exactly what I did. There are too many who claim to know how
to do these things when their knowledge is somewhat superficial. If they
encounter a glitch, such as the one I did when upgrading RAM a while back,
they're totally lost. Wasn't a bad motherboard or RAM, just
incompatible. The reasons were subtle and buried in motherboard documentation.
The First Surprise:
The first step was replacing the drive in my system which I planned to do
this evening. The one being replaced will be shelved for the other half's
system upgrade. Before tearing the system apart I checked on a few things
(learned the hard way to do these things).
Ooops! The bios on my motherboard doesn't support drives that large. OK,
off to the motherboard manufacturer's web site. Yep, there's a new bios
that supports huge drives (among a few other things). New first
step. Flash the bios on my motherboard. Not something I recommend doing
very frequently. Risk is low but consequence can be catastrophic for the
motherboard. If it doesn't flash properly, the machine will not boot . . .
period. Similar to Houston wondering if the Apollo 13 crew fired the
rockets correctly while around the dark side of the moon . . . and having
to wait until they appeared on the other side to find out . . . only the
consequences aren't nearly so severe.
-- John
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